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Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes
Heat one pint of tomatoes, and season with two teaspoons of Larkin Table Salt, one-eighth teaspoon of Larkin White Pepper, and two tablespoons of butter. When this is boiling, pour into it six eggs, slightly beaten. Cook until of a creamy consistency, stirring constantly, being sure that the mixture is stirred from the bottom. Serve on toast.
A chafing-dish supper dish that is essentially a wet scramble. The whole thing hinges on heat control: tomato acid plus direct heat will turn eggs granular in seconds.
- SaltTwo teaspoons for a pint of tomatoes and six eggs is heavy by current taste, especially if the tomatoes are canned and already salted. Start with half a teaspoon and correct at the end.
- A pint of tomatoesProbably canned or home-put-up tomatoes with their liquid, roughly a standard 14-16 oz can. Fresh tomatoes work if you peel and chop about 1 lb, but they release more water.
- Reduce before the eggs go inThe original says only to heat the tomatoes. If they are loose and watery, let them boil down to a thick pulp first, or the eggs will set into curds floating in tomato juice.
- The hinge: gentle heatOn a modern burner use the lowest setting, pull the pan off the heat while the mixture is still slightly loose, and keep stirring from the bottom as instructed.
- ButterTwo tablespoons is doing real work here, coating the eggs and softening the acidity. Do not cut it back.
- Brand namesLarkin Table Salt and Larkin White Pepper were the publisher's own products. Any fine salt and ground white pepper will do; white pepper is worth keeping for the colour, since black specks show in a pale scramble.
- YieldSix eggs and a pint of tomatoes serve three to four on toast. Have the toast made and waiting, as the eggs will continue to firm up in the pan.
Dishes of this kind were staples of the chafing-dish craze that ran from the 1890s through the First World War, when a spirit lamp and a metal pan on the sideboard let a hostess produce a hot supper without the kitchen, the range, or the servants; this recipe itself names no chafing dish. That repertoire was narrow and predictable, built on eggs, cheese, canned tomatoes, oysters and creamed anything, all of it cooked in one shallow pan and served on toast. Eggs scrambled with tomato is one of the oldest and most widespread versions of that idea, with close relatives across the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and it appears in American books of this period mainly because canned tomatoes were cheap, reliable, and always in the cupboard. The Larkin brand names in the ingredient list mark this as a promotional cookbook: Larkin Company of Buffalo built a large mail-order business selling soap and groceries directly to households, and recipe booklets naming its own salt and pepper were part of the machinery.